What we use in the Consortium of California Herbaria is a system that
associates semi-structured comments with the records as well as routing
them
to the curators of the data. See the recent comments link at the bottom
of
the main search page:
http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/
What is hard to appreciate is how much time is required for a curator
to evaluate a comment, locate the pertinent specimen (as is often
necessary),
make the necessary changes in the record (often _not_ the change
advocated by the
commenter) and the specimen, and pursue possible related errors.
Follow-up is not usually immediate, but at least the comment makes
evident that
a record may contain questionable data.
Richard Moe
On Jul 29, 2008, at 5:22 PM, <Donald.Hobern at csiro.au> wrote:
> I believe that we do need an approach which steers a mid-course between
> static web publishing and a typical wiki environment. The scratchpads
> are closest to my vision.
>> The biggest risk with a wikified environment is that essential
> information remains as unstructured text and largely hidden from data
> modelling and analysis. A widget-based approach (along the lines of
> the
> scratchpads or the Wikipedia boxes) could provide users with a friendly
> guided way to provide structured data.
>> The Atlas of Living Australia has received additional funding to work
> on
> Data Annotation Services (quick introduction at
>http://www.ala.org.au/dataannotation.htm). I hope that we will be able
> to take this beyond simple user comments on problems with data records.
> Obvious first steps are to capture proposed corrections as structured
> data and to build user interface components which generate small data
> snippets expressing trophic relationships, coding of taxon characters,
> or bibliographic data.
>> Donald
>> Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia
> CSIRO Entomology, GPO Box 1700, Canberra, ACT 2601
> Phone: (02) 62464352 Mobile: 0437990208
> Email: Donald.Hobern at csiro.au>> -----Original Message-----
>> Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:57:55 +0100
> From: Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] taxon wikipedia type resources
>> . . .
>> The fact that errors in GBIF persist for months, if not longer,
> suggests that this model of authoritative integration has flaws. If
> GBIF, say, had simple tools for community annotation they could
> dramatically improve the quality of their data.
>> . . .
>> Regards
>> Rod
>>> _______________________________________________
> Taxacom mailing list
>Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom>